Shades of Evil
by AerinAlanna
Summary: The Death Eaters as seen by an associate. Starting with Bellatrix Lestrange, then probably Lucius, Narcissa, Antonin Dolohov, Draco, Regulus Black, Snape, and Igor Karkaroff, but not in that order.
1. Bellatrix

_**Disclaimer: Not mine, will never be.**_

* * *

"Bellatrix, why don't you just find a way out of it?" Snape demanded, a rare expression of concern on his face. He hesitated, for even Voldemort's closest followers did not speak lightly of the Dark Lord's pastimes, and then continued, his lip curled in distaste. "I'm sure there's…something…that you can do for him to atone for your mistake." 

"Mistake?" The voice of the woman staring out the window was bitter. Ignoring the instinct to berate him to his face, she continued coldly, mocking his words. "A mistake is forgetting to wipe my mouth before kissing his robe. A mistake is approaching too close when speaking, or looking at his face and not showing proper humility." Her normally sinuous voice was taut with resentment, making him wonder what would happen if the tight rein on it were to snap.

The dark woman spun around to look him in the eye. She continued, her tone full of resentment. Though it was not aimed at him, he could still feel the heat of the bitterness in her words. "Severus, you of all people should know what our _Master _considers to be a mistake." Stepping closer, she stopped, her face inches away from his, unconsciously evidencing the dark circles under her hooded eyes, and the lines ingrained by stress and worry.

Her voice deadly quiet, she whispered, "Letting the Potter boy escape will not endear me to him any more than Lucius' failure with the diary made him the Dark Lord's favourite servant."

A mirthless smirk curved her full lips as she stepped back, giving him space. When she spoke again, her voice was hard. "I know what you believe me to be, Severus—I won't deny that I am. But the choice was not mine then, nor will it ever be. I obey his commands," she maintained, then let her breath out in a rush as she finished, "although I wish I could refuse."

Snape looked at her, a question on his face. Reading it, she straightened resolutely: once again a Slytherin lady of purest blood. "Yes, I could have declined graciously, stating some motive that would never satisfy him. I could have flawlessly played my part as the devoted wife and respectable Pureblood lady—if I were ready to join Regulus in whatever hell was prepared for those who do the things that we've done." She quirked an eyebrow. "The Dark Lord's trust in me is not so unfailing that he would accept my condolences with a nod and a smile."

She turned away, seemingly examining the room's Victorian décor. "I could refuse him, even now," she murmured, glancing up at him, and for a moment he thought she appeared older, and he saw weariness in her face. "But I have not your countless wiles, Severus." She bit her lip, reluctant to speak freely even with one she had long called friend. "And I am not yet willing to die."

Composing herself, she lifted her gaze and gave him a brittle smile. He shuddered, haunted by ghosts of a too-distant past. That smile was a corruption of the vitality that Bellatrix had possessed as a child and, later, as a young woman. The indomitable girl he had known was hiding inside, he believed; however, he was unsure if she could ever escape.

"Be grateful, Severus, and pray that the Dark Lord's tastes never change." She paused deliberately, brushing his cheek with her well-manicured hand, and the sensual feel of her intentionally careless touch repulsed him. "For your sake, if nothing else." The corner of her mouth twitched in inward amusement. "As for me, I hope he decides that women disgust him."


	2. Draco

_The next chapter: Draco. Please tell me if this is too much for a T rating, and I'll change it._

_**Disclaimer: Only the plot is mine.**_

* * *

"I never thought it would be like this," the fair-haired young man said, looking at the charred remains of Hogwarts' Great Hall. "I didn't think…I mean, I knew there would be death and blood and Unforgivables, but I didn't know that it would be quite so…unreal." His voice fell, and he looked at the dark man beside him.

"I killed today, you know: people I've known for years—with whom I went to school!" He paused, staring at the ruins of the teachers' table, now glaringly empty in the silence. Glancing at Snape with a slight shake of his head, he continued. "No, I didn't exactly like them—hated some of them, even—but…Professor, I took their _lives_ away from them!"

His mentor watched him silently, letting the young Death Eater talk. There was something important here, and he wanted to know what it was.

"I saw Potter die, too. We all did, I think—that light shone everywhere, and it seemed that everything just…_stopped_…and everyone looked at them. Lord Voldemort and Potter…Harry, that is…and then he died." An expression of bewildered awe came over his face.

"It's so strange—I can't remember ever hearing or saying his name and not envying him for the attention. But now…he's _dead_. The Boy Who Lived…he's dead. It's unbelievable." He caught himself and added hurriedly, "I mean, I knew he would die—we all knew. But it's uncanny, knowing that he _is_ dead. After all, he beat me at Quidditch so many times. I hate to admit it, even now—especially now—but he was better than I was. I hated him for that."

Trying to shake off the eerie mood he was in, Draco slowly walked around the room, trailed by his former professor. He couldn't seem relieve himself of these feelings, even after telling Snape.

"And…then it was _her_. I couldn't understand—she fought and fought, hexing everyone she didn't know was on her side, but there were too many. The best witch of our year—the best witch of our generation!—and we…we killed her." He stopped, unable to continue.

Snape looked at the young man intently, his face dark with unbidden thought in the still room. "Is that all, Draco? You seem…unsure," he said, his voice breaking the uncanny silence. Even now, hours after the fight, he felt as though the cries of battle should still be ringing around him.

The young man's lips curved humourlessly. "You know me too well, Professor." With a sigh, he continued. "No, that's not all. Before we killed her…well, she was a Mudblood and all, but still…no." His shoulders dropped, an inexorable burden returning to them. "I'm getting distracted."

He faced the Potions Master. "She was one of the few Mudbloods left, and the only girl who was at Hogwarts with our younger group. So, we—Zabini, those idiots Crabbe and Goyle, and I—we decided to get revenge on her for the humiliations we suffered from her.

"We Apparated her over to the camp—safer there for us, you see. And then…well, Zabini decided that I should go first, you know, because I'd gone through the most—Crabbe and Goyle weren't going to do anything, because they're…different." He shook his head in unfeigned mystification, his lip curled in disgust. "So Zabini had her wand, and we pulled off her cloak and robe, and…you would never believe this, Professor, but she's beautiful."

Startled, Snape forced himself to remain silent. Granger had never been one of his favourite students, but he had never been able to completely dislike someone that intelligent, even if she _was_ a know-it-all Gryffindor.

Draco looked back down, slightly ashamed. "And then…I forced her to the ground, pressed her back down into the grass—well, what was left of it—and then I…" his voice failed him for a moment, and he looked up, his eyes filled with self-loathing as he began to fully understand what he had done. He swallowed, gathering his courage as he chose his words. "I—I raped her, Professor. I raped _Granger_. No." He shook his head slowly, thinking. "No. I raped Hermione. She might have had it coming to her—I don't know. All I know is that I took her innocence—she was a virgin, too; those rumours about her and Krum, and her and Potter, were false.

"She was terrified. She was more scared of me for those first few minutes than I've ever seen her scared of anything—even her NEWT results." He shook his head. "The whole school knew that she would have "Outstanding" on all of them, but she was convinced that she'd failed every single one." His lips pressed together, anguish written across his face. "But her face showed how frightened she was. I don't think she even knew what we were going to do until we Vanished her underthings. She probably thought that we were just going to embarrass her before we killed her…" He bowed his head, and his pale hair gleamed in the wintry light.

"And after that—after I took the thing she obviously prized even above her knowledge and books and endless research—after that, I killed her. I left her lying there on the ground, naked and vulnerable, helpless to defend herself…and I killed her. I didn't want Zabini to touch her—not him, for he disliked her even more, for some reason—and he would hurt her more than I had already done.

"So I ended it there, with that. And she died as I knew she hated to—powerless, without being able to throw a hex or a blow." A wry half-smile curved his lips, as if remembering something amusing, then his face hardened. "But with dignity, somehow, because she never protested once she knew what we were doing. She had more pride in her death than most of us have in our lives. She reminded me of Dumbledore, in a way…both brilliant, brave, devoted…and both dead.

"And…I don't know, Professor. It wasn't wrong…at least according to our laws…but I feel guilty about it. I'd never…forced a girl…before; and Hermione was a girl, even if she was a Mudblood Gryffindor. Now, though…" His voice broke, emotion overwhelming him and rendering him incapable of speaking. Closing his eyes for a moment, he took a breath, considering, then opened them swiftly, meeting Snape's steady gaze, his boldness tempered with shame. "I'm not sure if that matters—she was more intelligent than me, and more loyal—she stayed with Potter, fought alongside him, until he died. But for all of that, she was still just a _girl_, not yet an adult." He bit his lip, brooding. Finally, his voice quieter, he added, "I know how I would feel if someone did to a friend of mine what I did to…to Hermione."

He dropped to his knees on the bloodstained floor, his black robe pooling around him as he looked up at Snape, who stood silent, wrapped in his cloak.

"What can I do to lose this feeling that I am covered with blood?" he demanded, his rough voice echoing in the empty room. "Hermione's, Dean Thomas', Finnegan's—that one should never have been fighting; Longbottom's—he fought for his family, and his friends." His voice softened. "A pacifist, that's what he would have been, if he could have; but in a war, everyone fights, or they die." He sighed and looked down at the bloodstained floor. "Or both."

He stared at a puddle on the floor—was it blood, or had someone been melted? Shaking his head, he shuddered; it was impossible to tell in the twilit hall. He gazed at the puddle, but he didn't see the blond hair and grey eyes that he expected. Instead, he saw her, copying notes in Potions, pushing her bushy hair away from her face as her quill moved rapidly across the parchment. Then the image changed: she lay on the ground, looking up at him, trembling in fear…he pulled his gaze away, forced himself to examine the tattoo on his left arm.

"It's over. Can it really be?" He paused. "I mean, we've been waiting for…longer than I've been alive, but…it doesn't seem like it can be over." A trace of a smirk touched his mouth, an ironic twist of the lips whose humour didn't reach his eyes.

"I don't quite know what to do, now that Potter and Granger and the Weasel are gone…no one to mock anymore, no goals to set and then later decide not to accomplish, you know?" He glanced up at his former Professor, his expression like that of a little boy caught in wrongdoing. "It's a good thing Father didn't hear me say that. You won't tell him, will you?"

Lost for words, Snape knelt beside his former student and wrapped his arms around the young man. Draco was still a boy, he realized—Lucius had tried to make his son grow up so quickly that he had never discovered the difference between playacting at Death Eaters and the reality that was disturbing him so much right now. It would take a long time for that little boy to heal.

x-X-x x-X-x x-X-x


	3. Lucius

_Also, to avoid confusion, I'm going to say that this is not in chronological order. Each one is from a different time during the same storyline, but not in any specific order. _

_**Disclaimer: If I owned this, I would be selling it, not writing and posting it on **__**here, obviously.**_

* * *

"Severus, I just don't know what to do," the blond man said, shaking his head as he spoke and pacing around, glancing at the books on the shelves of his library. "The Dark Lord has more plans for defeating Potter, but to tell the truth…I don't think that any of them will succeed. There is too much protection around the boy for them to work, but He will not listen, not if all of us told him so." Lucius dropped into one of the Victorian-era armchairs that were arranged around the table in the centre of the room.

His haughtily superior expression was gone for once, replaced by an anxiety that belied the elegant garments that he always wore. The perfectly styled green, black, and silver robes were accented with a silver clip at the base of his neck that held his hair back in a low ponytail, and by the flawless silver brooch that held his cloak on, for he had not removed the cloak when he entered the manor.

"I've told you before, Lucius, that Potter had only the protection that Dumbledore gave him, and that little that his mother gave him, which is gone now that his Muggle family is destroyed. There is nothing left to him except his own strength, and that of his friends." Snape smirked, amusement showing in his dark eyes. He stood by the table, watching Lucius. "Of the two, I would fear the latter more, if I were the Dark Lord—the Mudblood Granger has a better chance of defeating a Death Eater than Potter himself, little as I like to say so. Unfortunately, the girl _is_ intelligent, and with her help Potter and Weasley can do more than by themselves or together."

He sighed, clearly annoyed with the trio of students. "However, all of this matters little. The Dark Lord has enough Death Eaters to take on all of Hogwarts and Beauxbatons without problem, so what the students can do has no affect on any plan of His."

"But Severus, even with all that taken into consideration…isn't there some way to defeat the Potter boy without killing all of the students? Some of them _are_ Purebloods, after all, and if they were killed, there would be even fewer marriageable Purebloods." Lucius stood up and walked over to one of the bookshelves, pulled down a thick tome, and walked back over to the table. Laying it down on the table, he opened it, scanning a page.

"Ah, here," he said, finding the entry. "Families of Pure Blood: the Blacks, now deceased except for Bellatrix; the Notts; the Malfoys, the Parkinsons, the Crabbes, the Goyles, the Lestranges…" he trailed off, a look of sheer distaste on his face. "…and the Weasleys…though they do not count, blood traitors that they are."

Snape grimaced. He had never liked the Weasleys very much, either, though that exit that the twins had made when that idiot Umbridge was there had brightened up his day. Umbridge had been even worse than the Weasleys…at least the Weasleys didn't talk in girly high-pitched voices.

"Well, what do you think will happen when we kill over half of the students at Hogwarts? Will their families join us in love as soon as we do so? Will the survivors be so grateful that they beg to become followers of the Dark Lord? I don't think so, Severus, and I know that you do not, either. I have seen the look on your face when you are forced to do something you do not like, and that is the look that resides there permanently now." Lucius closed the book silently, and sat back down, crossing his arms. Looking up at his ally, who was now in deep thought, he waited.

The dark eyes that never revealed any emotions but distaste and anger were troubled now, and turbulent emotion rolled through them. He thought through possible words carefully, then spoke. "I think that if the Dark Lord does attack Hogwarts again, to end this war by killing Potter, he will find much more disparity than he now expects. There are many who respected Dumbledore when we were in school, and many of those still respect his memory, secretly. He was a man who…imbued the characteristics that one wishes for in a leader, which the Dark Lord sometimes does not. However, he was weaker overall, because he was compassionate, and he could never have defeated the Dark Lord on his own." He paused, contemplating.

"That is where the Golden Trio comes in," he said curtly. "Potter is the strength, Granger is the brains, and Weasley is the heart of it. Together they can do things that Dumbledore could not, great wizard that he was, for they, combined, are much stronger and better than most of those on our side."

Lucius tilted his head to one side. "Are you saying that we can be defeated by a group of teenagers?" He raised an eyebrow and allowed amusement to come into his eyes. "Surely not. You know how strong we are now, and those who came from Azkaban to join us have made us stronger."

Shaking his head slowly, Snape met his friend's eyes. "I'm afraid that those additions are not enough to help us defeat that 'group of teenagers'. They have power that we do not, and are skilled beyond their years in magic."

"Then we are doomed? Our cause is doomed?" The blond man held Snape's gaze. "Is there nothing that we can do?"

His friend hesitated. "Very little that I can think of, unless something happens."

"Fine, then!" Lucius responded, his head uplifted, proud and strong, reminding Snape of one of the great nobles from the Wars of the Roses. "As the Americans said during their civil war, 'Forget hell.' This is a long war that shall end only in our defeat unless we find some way to separate each faction of the whole. The Order of the Phoenix must be split, the Golden Trio must never be side by side, and the Gryffindors must never be all together, for their bravery, though foolish, still holds great sway in a battle, for it uplifts the others."

Snape sat down on a chair that faced Lucius'. "If we could but do that, then we would have a chance." He put his head in his hands. "But so little, a wisp only..." he trailed off.

"Then there is hope, even if it be but little," Lucius rejoined emphatically. "We can only persevere in our aims until we are all defeated, for what is life when the most noble of the wizarding race are pressed into the dirt? When the Pureblood houses are forced to give way to those of Mudbloods and blood traitors, and our children obligated to interact with theirs at all times? That is no life for such as noble as the Pureblood wizarding race, and we will not stand for it!" He stood up, an avenging angel of the night, exuding passion and commitment unsurpassed as he spoke his thoughts.

"If we cannot achieve our goal, fulfil our cause, then what use is there in living? I ask you, Severus—what pleasure is there in being dominated by such a plebeian people? None! To live in a world filled with them and ruled by them only decreases the vitality of life and the perfection of existence. If we lose, then we do so only because we have nothing else to aid us, not because we lacked the will to try!"

"Exactly so, Lucius. We shall try, and if in doing so we are defeated, it will not be for lack of perseverance." Snape looked at his friend. He was not meant for this time or place—he should have been born in a time when duty and honour were the most important of all things. Much like those Southern rebels in the States, he was: full of pride and determination and fortitude, not meant for a time when it was not the right of one's cause that mattered, but the public view of that cause.

A searing pain burned the mark on their arms black. "So it begins," Snape murmured.

"And it shall end in time, with victory or with defeat," Lucius added, voice steady. "Malo mori quam foedari."

As they Disapparated, Snape thought that the Latin phrase fit his friend very well.

xXx xXx xXx


End file.
